Ariel Sands is the pseudonym on Never the Face, a brutal sadomasochistic novel issued by St. Martin’s Press in April 2011. The writer is also said to be an internationally known non-fiction author under another name. That other name has never been made public. The split identity is part of how the book reads: erotic fiction about dominance and submission, and a serious writer’s private experiment in a made-up world.
The novel is narrated in the first person by a woman David trains. In the book she is called only Kitten or Bitch. He shapes her into a submissive sexual role built on bondage, orgasm control, and beating. The imagery has been called brutal. What starts as consensual training slides. Physical violence and emotional control both escalate until the arrangement no longer looks like a scene the bottom can leave cleanly. For SM readers this is not a how-to. It is a novel about a power exchange that stops pretending to be a negotiated scene and sinks into something harder to exit.
The main public clues to Sands’s identity sit in an interview she gave Claire Messud for Guernica. Messud met her in person in Berlin in May 2011 and wrote that, under another name, Ariel Sands is “an internationally known and highly respected writer of nonfiction.” Messud does not say whether that other name is a legal name or a second pen name. Sands is slight and elegant but has a commanding presence: in her professional life she is used to speaking in front of crowds. Both the fiction and the non-fiction, and her speech, are marked by acerbic wit, erudition, and concision. Her manner is formal, sometimes clipped, with a ready, throaty laugh. She calls herself a feminist and is described as a female success story even though the novel’s protagonist is defined by obsessive submissiveness. The interview does not give a nationality. The publisher’s site calls her only a “bestelling author,” typo and all.
Sands told Messud she used a pseudonym to avoid genre confusion with her non-fiction and so the novel would be taken on its own terms, instead of being read through whatever the public already knew about the author. Books she named as influences include Story of O, Venus in Furs, Moby-Dick, The Man of Feeling, and The Emigrants. That list is half SM canon and half literary furniture, which matches the split she was trying to protect: a respected non-fiction name on one shelf, and on the other a brutal novel about a woman trained, beaten, and renamed. She is on the cusp of forty.
